Pushing Daisies

I've heard of the show Pushing Daisies, but until last night, hadn't ever seen it. I knew it was about a pie maker who has the ability to bring people back from the dead and so has a PI job on the side solving murders. His partner in the PI business is a big black man who knits. And his childhood crush is dead but they can never be together, and so on.

Quirky shows I can do, esp if there's knitting, but I could never find it and frankly it wasn't a high priority for me to do so.

But last night, I was surfing channels on our new flat screen high def digital TV (Husband is loving it), I saw a bit of it for the first time. Turns out, it was the last episode. Figures.

I had no idea that the visuals were so up my alley. The colors! The costumes! The stylized look of it all. To quote from the wikipedia entry:

Visual design
Production Designer Michael Wylie told TV Guide that, "My goal was a storybook come to life. I wanted everything to look almost like an illustration." He achieved this by "concentrating on conflicting patterns in different colors, particularly reds and oranges, but per director Barry Sonnenfeld, virtually no blues."

Cinematographer Michael Weaver told Variety that he and the producers decided the visuals should "feel somewhere between Amélie and a Tim Burton film — something big, bright and bigger than life."

The distinctive storybook-esque style is continued within the overall design of the visual aspects. Regardless of the fact that the show focuses on murder investigations, the morgue is still painted in candy-cane stripes and many of the outfits worn by the characters are vibrantly colored, bright, and cheery (for example, Olive's work uniform is a lime-green pinstriped dress, and Emerson is frequently seen wearing shades of purple).

And of course, Pushing Daisies is cancelled. However it is in my Netflix queue.

Speaking of the new TV, I rewatched Death at a Funeral, on the new TV, with the commentary with Alan Tudyk, and fast forwarded to just his scenes. Did I mention he's naked in much of the movie?